2016 Artist Listing
Ones to Watch: Thirty-seven standout artists to keep your eye on this year
For the past two years, I have had the privilege, and pleasure, of researching Maine art and interviewing and writing about its practitioners for the Canvas, MH+D’s monthly tribute to the skilled creators in our state. I am constantly amazed at the wealth of artistic talent to be found here, and enjoy learning more about our established artists. But it is a particular thrill to come across the work of an artist who is new to me.
This year’s listing showcases a selection of Maine artists who are either emerging or who have been practicing for some time but may not be well known to MH+D readers. Some create art that hews to traditional modes, while others employ unorthodox media and unexpected styles.
This year’s listing showcases a selection of Maine artists who are either emerging or who have been practicing for some time but may not be well known to MH+D readers. Some create art that hews to traditional modes, while others employ unorthodox media and unexpected styles.
What you’ll see on the following pages is not a definitive list, nor is it meant to be. Our goal is simply to call attention to artists whose work deserves serious consideration. My hope is that you are inspired to learn more about the artists listed here and to discover others we weren’t able to include. It is vitally important that we support Maine artists. Whether we collect or simply admire, we are making a crucial investment in Maine’s cultural heritage.
Dietlind Vander Schaaf
My work draws upon my interest in contemplative practices and focuses on temporary, fleeting moments of beauty, balance, and stillness. I convey an emotional tone through texture and pattern, and use mark making as a way to communicate what I find most lovely, haunting, and curious about the human condition.
Miles Chapin
My work blends motion and sentiment. Some sculptures are about passion; others are about contemplating interior space. I start with a feeling as the foundation of each piece. My goal for each completed sculpture is that it provoke emotion in the viewer through geometric form.
Liz Hoag
I begin most of my landscape paintings on trips around Maine and New England. I choose a view based on its natural three- and two-dimensional balance. Through the use of color, layering, and directional design elements, I piece together a more intricate and balanced abstract composition, resulting in a calming and peaceful whole.
Nancy Glassman
I am drawn to light and the life cycles it fuels. I like to sort out complications, make sense of plant patterns and rhythms. I let the colors and energies of my surroundings flow through me. I like the feel of the brush. Painting is an act of noticing, of celebrating, of drawing resilience.
Shawn Fields
One of the goals of my work is to share with the viewer a sense of joy and fearlessness. The disciplines of drawing and painting offer endless ways to depict themes such as childhood, home life, and playing inventively, by which I hope to tap into a universal sense of what is possible.
Randy Colbath
I am committed to creating work that is socially relevant as well as aesthetically pleasing. The Indigenous series references the call to replace Columbus Day with Native American Day.
Elizabeth Fox
I like to work from my gut, mixing the beautiful with the mundane. By emphasizing the relationships between people, objects, color, and space, everyday scenes can become mysterious, funny, or strange. I try to leave the painting’s story open-ended so it’s less obvious and more delicate.
Craig Becker
Stories form the foundation of our human experience. I create incomplete stories where the elements of the image touch but their relationship is ambiguous. This encourages the viewer to connect the dots and create his or her own narrative. The framework is visually and emotionally complex, inviting exploration into the beauty within the shadows.
Sarah Mcrae Morton
My work is to draw from art history, natural history, and family history to see a glimpse of time to come. My paintings are reminders that the past is present, but the hope I instill in them gives them belonging to the future. To me, painting is casting a wish.
Jeffrey T. Fitzgerald
This painting is about the sea and passion. I engage the brine of kelp, tiny branches, and froth caught in crosscurrents and elements most primal. My paintings are from the place I live and have lived, roamed, trudged about, and spied upon. With a fever for color, my work is about painting out the energy and drive creativity brings.
Felice Boucher
My fine art photography is still and direct, and closely parallels my meditation practices. All sense of time and place is set aside when I focus on a photograph’s creation. Although much of my time is invested in commercial photography, my fine art work is grounded in passion for the craft of photography itself and what I can make from it.
Jeanne Wells
I use alternative and antiquarian photographic processes because the real joy for me is in the work of the hands, the craft. This allows room for great mystery, for lack of a better word, and lets me follow the image as it evolves and morphs and mingles with that mystery to find its own voice.
Roxanne Cottongame
Photography embodies our memories and connects us to something that will no longer exist. My photographs explore intimacy, emotional states, and the ephemeral. Not only do they capture my feelings and ideas, but they respond to my perceptions and experiences with time, place, distance, and longing.
Rosalind Fedeli
For many moons, I have been creating fascinating art from found materials. My pieces are powerful, evoc- ative, and provocative. Most recently, in a series of collages I interpret music videos that inspire my own visual translations. Making art is a solitary endeavor; sharing it connects me to people.
Rick Fox
Recent travels have led me to notice and conflate similarities between Byzantine and early Renaissance painting and the work of the early Modernists. I am excited by the possibilities and the challenges that come with simplification, and by the contemporary relevance of organizing shapes within four edges. My desire to continue to explore personal thrills of color continues to be very present.
Will Sears
I work primarily in assemblage, drawing upon the rich tradition of Maine assemblage artists, such as Louise Nevelson and Bernard Langlais. My work utilizes imagery of hand-painted typography and abstract geometry. By cropping and rearranging the painted words, I draw the viewer’s focus from the associated message of the words to the physical composition of the letters as form.
Robert Colburn
I see my process as an acknowledgement of the big and small moments in life, whether encountered in the course of a day or reflecting on years past. Stylistic diversity allows for one painting to inform another without the burden of consistency, the aggregate result being a more true representation of my interest in the semiotics of our time.
Tynan Byrne
My work in still and moving image revolves around phenomenology. What interests me most is discovering the hidden routines that chaos leaves behind. I aim to capture this residue of events in print and draw awareness to its natural patterns.
Annette Kearney
I am pleased with a positive viewer response, but color, dimension, and form occupy my mind when I am working. I let the viewer determine his or her reaction.
Mat Thorne
My work has always been a manifestation of my concerns. Recently I’ve been drawn to nostalgia, consumer culture, nutrition, and decay. This image has a little to do with all of those things.
Michael Marks
The research process that goes into my art begins with interacting with a landscape through a series of movements. The translation into work of art is my reaction to the disjointed experience of altered and unaltered spaces.
Tom Flanagan
I’ve always been fascinated by artists who build their own language with a few colors, blank canvas, and time. My work is more about listening than speaking. It is not about issues external to the visual experience of the work. Ultimately, I make pictures I want to see.
Emilie Stark-Menneg
My paintings, sculptures, videos, and performances are about energy and transformation, about the divine, goofy, and ineffable crashing together in a kind of tropical dance party gone haywire.
Heather Lyon
The striking wild beauty of coastal Maine compels me to explore the ways we encode places, states of being, and time. In the Venus series, I consider the spectrum of experience from a cellular to a cosmic planetary level, trying to understand that which is indescribable because of scale, distance, or complexity. The surfaces move in and out of abstraction, receding, advancing, hovering, always with a softness and intimacy—like love.
Ruth Hamill
I paint with traditional materials in new ways, striving for the feeling a body of water projects, along with translucency, light, and movement. You’ve never seen paintings like mine. And yet if, like me, you live to be near water, there is an instant familiarity and sustained connection with my waves.
Ben Lincoln
My paintings feature a diversity of subjects in styles that range from photorealism to abstraction to my own brand of expressive surrealism, with approaches that prioritize both the aesthetic and the allegorical. Consistent throughout all of my work is love of craft, dedication to material, and a desire to connect visual perception with emotional experience.
Carrie Scanga
I make spatial experiences that serve as metaphors for incorporeal states of the human experience: loss, possibility, and change. Fascinated by how physical environments and architectural structures resonate with emotional states of being, I use my memory and perceptions of particular places and events to create allegorical space through installations and prints.
E. Kendra Denny
Living on the Maine coast has shaped who I am as an artist. Not only do I draw constant inspiration from the beauty of my home state, but I am also influenced by the rich tradition of artisans in our area. I believe in taking the time necessary to do a job well, and I get a deep sense of satisfaction from completing a painting. My art is my craft.
Matthew Russ
Direct observation is the key to my work. As a landscape painter, this means working outdoors in all seasons and weather. Carrying my mobile studio in a backpack, I explore quiet ponds, windy mountaintops, and remote islands. These adventures heighten my instincts and ingenuity, infusing my paintings with a natural energy.
Chris Osgood
Painting outdoors in oils is an exercise in trying
to relay a small portion of what I’m experiencing using colors and shapes. It has little to do with representing a scene. It’s an interpretation of energy experienced physically. With my ink paintings, the flow of energy is more readily apparent. I see them as brief moments in time.
Katia Mason
The unexpected scenes I discover in close-up observations of nature inspire my work. To share the awe of those moments, I employ an explorative layering process, using a variety of media to create depth and movement. With each layer something new emerges, other things become hidden, and the light changes, providing new perspective.
Jessica Ives
I paint out of love for the world and for the human capacity to know the world through movement, recreation, and adventure. Kinesthetic intelligence and imagination are very important to me; so is the sensation of wonder. That a small movement of paint can capture a large movement of body through water, and that we can know the world’s beauty through both these actions, is astounding.
Eric Leppanen
I am an action painter who recycles used paint, giving it a new life. I allow the paint the opportunity to direct itself, flowing out in unpredictable ways and creating unique interactions. My application techniques continue to evolve while I still embrace the element of chance.
Sarah Baldwin
The intention of my work in both concept and process is an awakening to the nature of reality. Drawings built through repetitive stamping and washes of ink are meditations meant to realign the body and mind to an organic pace. Each work is a contemplation of the function of the physical world and its cyclical rhythms.
Penn Chan
I specialize in documentary and alternative-process photography. Portraits have always been an important component of my work and process. I tend to focus on photographs that stray from traditional smiles in order to capture the quieter, fleeting moments that are easily missed.
Sharon Arnold
My work is internal. Growing up in Maine can be isolating, leading one to learn to entertain and amuse, to tell stories. My latest series, Summer of Silence, goes back to the beginning: I am back again, returning to black-and-white with a touch of color. Loss and salvation.
K. Min
Beauty and loss. Time and memory. Emptiness and appreciation. Warmth and intimacy. Story and metaphor. Space and distance. Melancholy and loneliness. Silence and peace. Humor and comfort. Sincerity and originality. Subtlety and depth. Life and mystery. Hurt and wounds. Simplicity and poetic minimalism. This is what I want to convey from my heart to my work.